Apple Releases New Features in WWDC 2024
TapTechNews June 12th news, Apple has released the highly anticipated iOS 18 and macOS 15 systems at WWDC 2024, and one of the important new features is Apple Intelligence - a set of AI-based toolkits. This feature will be officially launched later this year, and Craig Federighi, Apple's software engineering director, disclosed some future development plans about Apple Intelligence in an interview with FastCompany.
Apple Intelligence will empower users with a series of practical AI-assisted functions, such as helping users rewrite text, summarize information, generate images and even emojis. In addition, thanks to the update of AI, Siri will also become more intelligent and be able to understand the context of the screen content and allow users to control more aspects of the device.
It is worth noting that Apple's Apple Intelligence adopts a processing method that combines the device side and the cloud side. At the same time, Apple also announced a cooperation with OpenAI to integrate its well-known language model ChatGPT into Siri. Although Apple has been committed to building its own language model, Federighi also acknowledged that there are other excellent large language models (LLMs) in the market.
These cutting-edge Very Large Language Models have exciting capabilities that can bring more convenient experiences to users. We believe that integrating them into Apple products can make it more convenient for users to use, Federighi said. GPT-4o is one of the most outstanding LLM at present, which is also the reason why Apple chose to integrate it into Siri.
In order to protect users' privacy, when Apple Intelligence cannot answer users' questions, Siri will ask for users' consent and then send the relevant requests to ChatGPT for processing. Federighi disclosed that Apple also plans to add support for more third-party language models in the future to enable users to choose the most suitable model according to their own needs.
The Chinese market is one of Apple's most important markets. Federighi said that Apple is currently trying to find a way to introduce Apple Intelligence to the Chinese market. Although there is no specific timetable at present, this is definitely what we want to do. Apple Intelligence will initially only support American English, and it is not clear whether users in other regions will be able to use this function.
TapTechNews noticed that in the interview, Federighi also talked about other topics related to Apple Intelligence. For example, some user requests will be processed by Apple's own artificial intelligence server named PrivateCloudCompute. Apple has developed a method to encrypt and destroy the data requests after processing them, so as to ensure that users' private information will not be leaked.
Although Federighi expects that future chips will be able to run much larger language models, he also emphasized that having an online model is still very important because it can provide users with the latest information. I don't rule out this possibility, he said. But even in such a future, I also think that when the device handles users' requests, it will still need to access external knowledge bases. Therefore, even in the future when it can be fully offline processed, interacting with external services will still play an indispensable role.
Apple WWDC 24 Developer Conference keynote special